Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Mike Ruppert and I spent the entire hour chatting about the accelerating rate of collapse we are seeing, its causes and what it portends. Maybe it will give you optimism, maybe it will calm you down. Just because the entire planet is on the verge of a nervous background doesn't mean that you have to be.

Sunday, February 26, 2012

There is an old Russian saying: “If I
had known where I would fall, I would have put down some straw
there.” (“Кабы знал я где упал, я б соломки подостлал.”)
It is one of thousands of such sayings that are the repository of
ancient folk wisdom. Normally, it is used to express the futility of
attempting to anticipate the unexpected. Here, I am using it
facetiously, to underscore the madness of refusing to anticipate the
unavoidable.

I started thinking along these lines
when I was invited to speak at the annual conference of ASPO
(Association for the Study of Peak Oil), which was held in Washington
in October of last year. It was shaping up to be something of a
victory lap for the Peak Oil movement, now that the moment when
global conventional oil production reached its historical peak is
well and truly behind us, while the newer unconventional sources of
liquid fuels have turned out to be insufficiently abundant and too
costly both to the pocketbook and the environment. I wanted to use
this opportunity to try yet again to correct what I see as a major
flaw in the narrative of Peak Oil: the idea of a gentle,
geologically-driven decline in oil production, which seems quite
unrealistic, which I had detailed in my article “Peak Oil is History” more than a year before. But I also wanted to look beyond
it and sketch out some plans that would work after oil production
dives off a cliff, and what it would take to get them off the ground.

Monday, February 20, 2012

You hear a lot of talk about relocalization and deindustrialization. The pastoral life, the good old days. How romantic! Reality pays you a visit when your pick-axe hits a rock, a chunk hits your face, and you taste your own blood.

Unaware of it at the time, I was a child of privilege, one of five born to a Chairman of Earth and Space Sciences at a State University in New York. We were all expected to be high achievers. I fulfilled the expectation and put in 32 years as an engineer helping the über-wealthy zip around the skies in personal rocket ships from one golf game to another while chalking it off as business expenses, when all I ever really wanted to do was sit out in the woods and cook some food on a stick over a fire.

In 1994 I acquired a 160 acre tract of land in southeast Kansas, for a price only slightly above chicken feed, as a weekender place to go sit by that fire and decompress from the rat-race. 18 years ago the future didn't look quite so ominous. Reel forward to the present and this full-time back-to-the-land experiment is starting to look like a pretty good idea. Some stark realities become self evident however when you are actually 'living the life'. Talking about it is easy. Doing it is something altogether different. Here is where I wish to convey a few 'notes from the field':

1. You realize after a while it is mostly hard, dirty, repetitive and boring. Mud, blood, shit, sweat, discomfort, disappointment, death. There are rewards, but you have to have a passion for it to endure. People who have grown up ranching already know these things of course, but they don't have to adapt. They know the life.

2. If you create an artificial abundance of anything, Mother Nature will do her best to return things to the status quo. Plant a large garden and you will have more venison than you can eat. Goats are not native to this region, coyotes are. Eagles, hawks, owls, raccoons, possums, foxes and bobcats are also native here. Chickens are not. They will all eat your chickens, given a chance.

3. If you want to eat meat, you have to kill something. It's brutal and unpleasant. Blood is blood, you best get used to it. Warm guts smell bad. They smell different, depending on what you just killed, but they all smell bad. The first time you shove an arm elbow deep in warm guts and blood to tear loose some connective tissue, you are hard pressed to not lose your lunch. It begins to get a bit easier when you have a chilled carcass with the hide peeled off, and the pieces you hack off start to look like something you would buy in a grocery store, but the lifeless eyes continue to stare.

4. Intellectual deprivation. This was unexpected. It doesn't become apparent right away because you're so damned glad to be away from the crush of humanity and the demolition derby approach to getting around. Land is inexpensive in certain regions for a reason. Living elsewhere is much easier (so far). In this case, the regional economy has been in decline for 70 years. The population has declined nearly 80% from its peak, and the brain drain is close to 100%. Most anybody with ambition left long ago, and most youth leave, never to return. It is not hard now to understand why, historically, tribes of 1 to 5 haven't fared well. You need some minimum critical mass of human interaction to be able to survive psychologically, and some degree of specialization and division of labor just to cover all the bases. For those of you considering it, the 'survivalist bunker' approach to dealing with the future would be ill advised. Social interaction is not just something nice, it is an imperative.

Not to be too glum, on the upside there is sunshine, fresh air, fresh meat, eggs, milk, cheese, honey, fruits, nuts, vegetables, abundant wildlife and beautiful scenery. You don't need to 'go to the gym' to stay in shape either.

To peer into the future and see nothing beyond an endless re-run of this hard living is enough to put fear and dread in most hearts. I find it increasingly difficult to believe that dispossessed cubicle dwellers will be able to adapt physically or mentally.

In this setting it is not hard to envision the emergence of a tradition where you take each seventh day off from the grunt work and get together with your friends and neighbors just to celebrate the fact you are still breathing. No deities or voodoo required. Then just for fun, throw a big feast every solstice and equinox and invite everybody. Wait... haven't we been there before?

People tend to think of a 'land of milk and honey' as something idyllic and easy. This land of milk and honey is accessible, tangible and real, but it comes with strings attached.

Friday, February 17, 2012

Here is an excellent new animated short that ties resource depletion, environmental destruction and the end of growth into a single tidy package. For those of you already versed in this subject matter, this might still be good review; for those of you who don't, PLEASE DON'T PANIC! And when introducing this to people, please remind them that they will need a couple of years to come to terms with this, and should try to not panic in the meantime.

[The following comment has been promoted from the comments due to its excellence.]

Thank you for that link DO, this film had the oddest effect of making me
laugh out loud at the cartoon antics while simultaneously feeling very
scared and alone. I want to send it to some friends of mine but it would
scare them shitless.

I walked through Times Square today,
the Digital Canyon, the High Altar of Waste, and remembered something I
had said to a friend years ago while in school. We were both tripping
out minds out on LSD and watching CNN. An image of an African man who
had been crushed by a tank flashed on the screen and I spent the rest of
the night with that image burning like a nugget of molten iron in my
mind. Burning, mind you. His legs and lower torso were all that
remained, the rest had been neatly cut off and ground to a white
speckled bloody paste by the tank's treads.

(Note to all: NEVER do LSD and watch the international news...)

At
one point in my very real agony, I turned to my old friend, a lefty
like myself and a newshound and a reader of books about US atrocities in
South America and Africa etc. and I said

"Do you know how much fucking pain we are letting ourselves in for?"

My
point was that the more we learned about the world, the worse it was
going to be for us because we would never be able to escape that
knowledge. Look at a shiny new gift and you see the starving kids who
made it in Taiwan. Thrill at the latest action adventure flick and you
come away with a sour aftertaste of militarism, sexism, and racism. Buy a
bag of cookies and you buy a bag of pesticides, GMOS, and corn syrup.
Nothing can escape your critical eye, including yourself.

The
constant whittling away of all illusions, or at least the attempt to do
so, changes a person incrementally, so slowly you don't notice but
suddenly you are outside of it all. Your critical eye has reached
critical mass: now you see all things inside out and upside down that
are supposedly right side right.

"Through the veil!" as one old
history professor used to say. You no longer get elated at the latest
iPhone commercials with your friends or marvel at the magic that is
Disney or worship the Kennedy brothers in a secret crypt under the
stairs. People begin to suspect something is wrong with you, you openly
mock the SuperDuperBowl, you make cracks about Baby Jesus helping you to
find your car keys, you refuse to Buy Now!at your local Toyota
Deal-Athon dealer. Curmudgeon, Crackpot, Grumpy, the accolades pile up
at your feet....

This came back to me as I watched the crowds
watching the enormous digital monitors and billboards in the Square. The
pain of not being able to slip into the biggest lie of all, the lie
that everyone else around you has allowed to flow into and through
themselves, that this is somehow an ok situation, that this waste and
constant jabber of lies and hucksterism, this smear of harsh light and
consumption, body counts and scenic views with advertising, disposable
people and trash mountains represents some kind of healthy beating heart
of something. I felt a twinge of that old pain, the alienation, the
sense of not being plugged into the coolest Kool-Aid around. But then I
said "Who fucking cares?" These people are lost, not their fault, they
aren't all idiots but rather lost in an illusion, a maze of lies and
pictures and warped mirrors. They can't see the man behind the curtain
and they sure as fuck cannot see that the machine he is operating is
nearing it's breaking point.

But when I watched that damned
cartoon tonight it hit again. It's good to know these things because I
like to know whats up, I'm a bad news first kind of guy. It's just hard
to be the bearer of such knowledge, in a sea of indifference and
fantasy. Gaze into the abyss and the abyss gazes into you, right?

Sunday, February 05, 2012

Predating all of the wonderful props at
Harry Potter's Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry (HSWW), the
original Wheel of Fortune surfaced in Monday Begins on Saturday,
a Soviet-era science fiction novella by brothers Strugatsky, where we
find it installed at a the Scientific Research Institute of Sorcery
and Magic (НИИЧAВO). It looks like the side of a moving conveyor
belt protruding out of a wall: since it never repeats its course, the
wheel must rotate slower than one RPE (revolutions per eternity)
meaning that its radius must be infinite, and its edge, projected
into our physical universe, appears as the edge of a conveyor belt
moving past us.

Unbeknownst to most of our
contemporaries, Fortune is actually a deity, like Allah or Jesus, but
unlike them she has been worshipped since most ancient times, as Tyche in Greece and as Fortuna in Rome. She continues to
be worshipped in the present times, around the world, but especially
in the US, where her temples and shrines are everywhere, from the
humble lottery machines at every corner shop, gas station and liquor
store to the casino capitalists who inhabit the glass towers of Wall
Street. Millions of mortals supplicate before Tyche daily. Virtually
unnoticed, the cult of Tyche dominates the religious landscape in the
US: just compare the sizes of the casino buildings in Las Vegas and
Atlantic City to the country's largest cathedrals and temples: except
for a few mega-churches, the former consistently dwarf the latter.

The essential act of worshipping Tyche
is by drawing lots, from which derives the term “lottery.”
Tyche's promise is that you too may win some day, and this simple
promise is powerful enough to allow her to hold much of the
population captive to her every whim, ready to gamble away their last
dollar. Tyche's spiritual solace is that, whatever happens, it is
never your fault, just your luck. Tyche also keeps the peace,
allowing us to overcome the envy and rancor we inevitably feel
against our betters: they succeed not because of their superiority,
but because of sheer dumb luck; we could all be just like them, if
only the all-powerful Tyche would favor us.

Of our two biggest religions, Islam was
far more successful of purging all the older polytheistic deities, locking up their
idols within the Kaaba at Mecca. (I would love to take a peek inside
the Kaaba to see if Tyche is imprisoned there, except that, being an
infidel, I would get beheaded for even trying.) While the Christians
have attempted to negotiate with Tyche, thinking that there is room
in the universe for both God's will and Tyche's random chance, Islam
did no such thing: Allah is eternal, omnipotent, omniscient,
omnipresent and omni-licious, so, if you please, check your
questioning mind at the gate and prostrate rhythmically in the
general direction of Mecca. Wagering is allowed, but only at camel
races, and only among the participating camel jockeys, while
“intoxicants and games of chance” are, according to the Quran
[5:90-91], “abominations of Satan's handiwork,” and so they are
haram (verboten). In a strict Moslem society the cult of Tyche
can gain no purchase.

Meanwhile, Christianity seems to have
utterly failed at resisting Tyche's charms. In the middle ages
Fortuna and her wheel were temporarily absorbed into Christian dogma,
making her a servant of divine will. But this gambit has failed, as
we recently saw when the Pope tried and failed to answer a simple
question posed by a young girl from a war-ravaged land: “Why did God
allow my friends to be killed?” Why does a just and merciful God
allow the murder of innocents? The real answer (“They were
unlucky”) cannot be spoken, because it would indicate that Tyche's
authority supercedes that of the supposed Almighty, causing cognitive
dissonance within the flock. At a less intellectual level, salvation
can be seen as an infinitely long winning streak, and the faithful
feel luckier from being sanctified in the blood of the Lamb. At the
almost completely non-intellectual level of superstition wherein many
believers dwell, Jesus is a sort of good luck charm. But what all of
this points to is that, in Christianity, nobody is really in charge
up there, so Tyche feels free to step in and fill the void,
incidentally absolving God of any responsibility for what actually
happens. He may be all-merciful and love mankind, but then He is not really
the one issuing the orders on a day-to-day basis. Bewildering, isn't
it?

More bewildering yet, Tyche's claim to
dominance is not limited to religion or gambling or finance. In
modern science, randomness (that is, chance, which is Tyche's domain)
is at the heart of all explanations of what happens at the level of
elementary particles. The functioning of the transistor—the device
at the heart of all electronics—is explained by saying that the instantaneous location of any given electron is not a point in space but a
probability distribution, with the actual location picked at random.
In spite of this, the observed behavior of transistors is quite
deterministic (except for a bit of hiss which we ignore).

As Einstein famously said, “God
doesn't play dice with the world.” And he was right: it is not God
who plays dice with the world, it's Tyche, and she is not shy about
it. The scientists are certainly keeping her busy with the so-called
Monte-Carlo models that are widely used in particle physics, which
are driven by randomness. The gigantic particle accelerators at
Fermilab and at CERN are the largest prayer wheels ever built,
praying that Tyche might show us an exotic particle or two.
Impressive though these are, perhaps the largest playground science
has given over to Tyche is in evolutionary biology: we are who we are
thanks to a sequence of random mutations. Thank you, Tyche, for the
opposable thumb, for bipedal locomotion, binocular vision, and for the
fact that we possess language! Without you, not only would we not
exist, but life itself would not have evolved out of primordial ooze
incessantly zapped by lightning.

I see all of this particularly clearly
because I am by nature highly resistant to Tyche's charms. The idea
of gambling revolts me, and I have never gambled, or purchased a
lottery ticket or a raffle ticket, or made a bet. To me, chance and
randomness are noise and garbage. I try to construct pockets of
difference and meaning within what appears to me as an indifferent and
meaningless universe. Any explanation that hinges on the work of
chance strikes me as one lacking explanatory depth. I do whatever I
can to eliminate chance from my life, and I actually detest the very
idea of luck. This puts me at quite a considerable advantage vis à
vis those who waste their energies on Tyche. This has nothing to do
with luck; it just has to do with conserving energy, because that is
precisely what Tyche is (in my opinion): a demon that haunts feeble
minds, forcing them to expend their energies in futile pursuits, in
order to keep other, even worse demons at bay.

Such futile pursuits can be quite
pleasant (not to me, but then I will concede that I am unusual) when
there is plenty of energy left to squander. But when that energy
starts to run out (along with most other resources on this
overcrowded, depleted, polluted planet), which it is currently
showing every sign of doing, then everyone's luck starts to
run out at the same time. As the situation goes from bad to worse,
people gamble away their savings and drop out of the game. The US
labor market since the financial collapse of 2008 is a case in point:
the labor pool has shrunk to the point that something like 10% have
lost their jobs, never to gain them back. There is a term for that:
it is called a decimation.

Decimation is a Roman military practice
that was used to discipline legions that did not perform well in
battle. Soldiers were organized in groups of ten and drew lots. Out
of each group of ten, one comrade drew the shortest stick, and was
promptly bludgeoned to death by the others. This, to them, made perfect sense.
In a superstitious culture, victory is a matter of luck, and so to
achieve victory, all one needs to do is to identify and purge the
unlucky ones, by the luck of the draw. Once they are gone, then by
definition all those who remain are lucky, and can go on to victory
confident in the knowledge that Tyche is on their side.

The decimation in the labor market has
had a similar effect: a lot of people are gone and have faded from
view, but the ones who were dismissed as companies “trimmed the
fat” are seen as the unlucky ones. Those who remain are, by
definition, lucky, and try to make the best use of their luck by
working ridiculously long hours. That may work once, but what if the
cycle of decimation is to repeat endlessly? The only historical case
of repeated decimation (the Legion of Thebes) was an act of
martyrdom, and so is not relevant. If a single round of decimation
fails to rally the troops to victory, the next one should drive them
to mutiny.

The labor market is just one example of
this sort; the retirement debacle is another. Those people in the US
who have managed to save for retirement are gambling with it, by
investing it in stocks (whose upside is limited by the economy's
inability to grow) and bonds (whose upside is limited by runaway
public debt, currency debasement, and eventual sovereign default
and/or currency devaluation). The financial collapse of 2008 has
decimated their retirement savings, and yet they are still gambling
with them. At what point will they refuse to keep playing? When all
of their savings are gone, or at some point before then?

At what point does a society made up of
gambling addicts refuse to gamble? Once they have lost everything? Or once it has become clear to them that the game has degenerated into
“Heads you lose, tails you lose”? Tyche's charms are appealing only
when she isn't cheating. But if you are invited to play, although you
(and just about everyone you know) always loses while some
perpetually “lucky” group always wins, then that fails to satisfy
the gambling urge, and Tyche fades away, to be replaced by the far
more destructive demons of envy and rancor which she previously held
in check. It will be very interesting to see how this will (pardon
the pun) play itself out. Obviously, I am not making any bets.